Re-Reading Roy Tennant

I just re-read Roy Tennant’s 2004 Library Hi Tech article on metadata. It makes a great deal more sense to me now than it did five years ago. Among the statements he makes that got my attention were,

“No single organization should own the essential pieces of a new bibliographic infrastructure”

and

“We do not need a bibliographic record format. We need a bibliographic metadata infrastructure that has a number of components, each of which may have multiple variations. Our systems must be able to accommodate a great diversity of record formats to provide us with the flexibility and power that only such diversity can provide.”